Due to their amorphous nature involving long range disorder and short range order, metallic glasses formed from glass forming alloys generally have excellent physical, chemical and mechanical properties, such as high strength, high hardness, high wear resistance, high corrosion resistance, high elasticity, high electrical resistance, good superconductivity, and low magnetic loss, which makes them suited for use in a wide range of fields, e.g. in the mechanics, medical equipments, electrics, and military industries.
Of particular interest are bulk glass forming alloys which are a group of multi-component metallic alloys that show exceptionally high resistance to crystallization in the undercooled liquid state. They usually can be vitrified at cooling rates of less than 10 Kelvin per second.
Some of these alloys are so-called “quasi-ternary” alloys, the components of which may be selected from one or more metals of the group IVB (or 4) and one or more metals of the groups VIIIB and IB (or 8-11) in conjunction with one or more metals selected from the groups IIA, IIIB, IIIA, IVA, VA, VB and VIB (or 2, 3, 5, 6, 13 and 14).
For the preparation of these alloys, the metals are usually employed in very pure form containing as little oxygen as possible which adds to the manufacturing costs.
The present invention seeks to find a method of lowering the manufacturing costs without compromising the physical, chemical and mechanical properties of the bulk metallic glass produced.